Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Beyond Mona

Fully understanding
the abuses women suffer

By: Gulamhusein A.
Abba

Note: Mona Eltahawy’s rage against the
injustices and indignities suffered by women at the hands of men is palpable
and comes through loud and clear in her article ‘Why Do They Hate Us” published
in Foreign Policy magazine. The cruelties that women suffer, as described by
her so graphically, are painful to read about. They need to be talked about, understood
and addressed.

However,
the subject is complex and an in-depth look is needed. Towards providing such a
look I have selected ten pieces for reproduction here, starting with the six
published by Foreign Policy magazine itself. These are followed by four essays carefully
selected by me from dozens that have been published. I have rounded up this post by
adding two revealing videos of Mona.

All
material appearing here is copyright and is being published here purely to
spread awareness and understanding.

Sondos Asem: Misogyny exists, but blaming it for women's
suffering is simplistic

Sondos Asem is senior editor of Ikhwanweb.com and a member
of the Freedom and Justice Party's foreign relations committee. Follow her on
Twitter @SondosAsem or @Ikhwanweb.

When I
marched to Tahrir Square on Jan. 25, 2011, I was driven by the indignities and
suffering endured by all Egyptians, men and women, from decades of corrupt and
oppressive rule. Despite the oppression, I believed in my power to effect
change. I believed then and I believe now that to bring about that change, we
need lots of determination and hard work.

Although I
share many of her concerns, I respectfully disagree with Mona Eltahawy's simplisticassertionthat the plight of women in the
Arab world is the result of being hated by the rest of society -- more
specifically, by men, and even more so by newly elected Islamists. In taking
issue with Islamists' view of women, Eltahawy uses a combination of hyperbole
and perhaps benign neglect to highlight offensive stances and bury more
women-centered ones. Far from constituting a solution, this type of
one-dimensional reductionism and stereotyping is one of the problems facing
Arab women. Let's be clear: There is misogyny in the Arab world. But if we want
progress for Arab women, we must hack at the roots of evil, not at its
branches.

Shadi Hamid is director of research at the Brookings Doha
Center and fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings
Institution. You can follow him on Twitter at@shadihamid.

Unquestionably,
the plight of Arab women is cause for considerable alarm. And it only seems to
have gotten worse since the Arab uprisings began. For this reason, Mona
Eltahawy's recent Foreign Policyessaymakes
for vital reading. But how and why did it get this bad? The answers to this
question are perhaps just as troubling, and require far greater consideration
than Eltahawy allows. In Egypt, women were at the frontlines of revolt. But
when it came time to cast their votes, the majority of Egyptian women voted for
parties that do not believe in "gender equality" as most Westerners
would understand the term. Presumably, men did not force them to do so. The
fact of the matter is that Arab women, throughout the region, are exercising
their moral and political agency, but not necessarily in the ways we might
expect.

In Kuwait,
Islamists vocally opposed giving women the right to vote. But when women were
eventually granted suffrage, Islamist parties did just as well, if not better,
in subsequent elections. In other words, women, in large numbers, were
exercising their right to vote for candidates who did not believe they had the
right to vote in the first place. Meanwhile, in an April 2011poll,
only 18 percent of
Egyptian respondents said they would "support a woman president."
Breaking it down by gender, female respondents were more open to the idea than
men were. But the vast majority -- 73 percent -- still said they would not
support a female presidential candidate.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is chairman of the Cordoba
Initiative and author of Moving The Mountain, which goes on sale May 8.

As Islam has
spread throughout the world, it has combined religion with native cultural
practices. Many centuries later, separating the religion from the underlying
culture has become difficult. That's why Islam as practiced in Egypt differs
from, say, Islam as practiced in Malaysia.

Mona Eltahawydescribes cultural practices in Egypt and the Middle East that
predate Islam yet have been embraced by many people now as part of Islam. The
practice of genital mutilation of women, for example, is found only in Africa.
If it were part of Islam, it would be practiced by Muslims all over the world.

For his time,
the Prophet Mohammed was a revolutionary feminist. Before him, Arab women had
no rights; they were men's property. Before Islam, men could have as many wives
as they wanted. While it might sound outrageous to Americans today, the Quran
insisted that men could have no more than four wives and that the wives must be
treated equally -- a radical idea at the time. In another major breakthrough,
the Quran decreed that female children must be given a share of their parents'
inheritance. In fact, with the explosion of wealth in some of the Gulf states,
women are now accumulating economic power through inheritance.

Hanin Ghaddar is the managing editor of NOW Lebanon and a
journalist based in Beirut.

I was 16 when
I first recognized that my father was terrified of me. We were at a grocery
shop in my town in southern Lebanon when my classmate, a boy, came in. All I
did was say "hi" and smile, but that was horrifying enough for my
father to spend the night screaming and banging his head against the walls
because he did not want to hit me. His little girl had turned into a woman with
a natural sex drive that he could not put off.

I was a
woman, one who could cause him shame and dishonor by talking to men in a public
space. His reaction triggered a tornado of mixed thoughts and feelings in my
mind. But in the midst of the confusion and deep fear, I sensed a strange
quiver of power.

In the years
that followed, I used this power against him and everything patriarchal in my
community. I gradually raised his expectations and, with them, his fears. His
alarm about me and my body made him more repressive, but it was his fear that
exposed his weakness and made me realize that I could break him.

Naheed Mustafa is a freelance writer and broadcaster based
in Toronto, Canada

Let me just
state right off the top: I have nothing against naked women. But as with all
things, there's a time and place. When they appear out of context, naked women
quickly become nekkid chicks. Now, granted, I'm hard pressed to point out
exactly when -- outside of three or four very specific scenarios -- it's
appropriate to plunk down a picture of a naked woman. But I'm certain it's not
smack in the middle of a serious essay about gender-based violence in the Arab
world.

Here's a
quick reenactment of me reading Mona Eltahawy's cover essay as my eyes
involuntarily (I swear!) flit over to Nekkid Burqa Woman.
"So, yes, women all over
the world have problems -- BOOBS! -- yes, the United States has yet to elect a
female president -- BOOOBS! -- and yes, women continue to be objectified in
many "Western" countries -- BOOOOOBS!" And so on

.

When I was
asked to contribute this critique, I had to ask myself what exactly my problem
was. I've narrowed it down to two things: The image of Nekkid Burqa Woman is
lazy and insulting.

Let's talk
lazy first. And by lazy I mean editorially. Illustrations for print stories are
meant to illuminate the text, to present a further dimension to the written
word. They are not incidental to the item. The image of a naked woman with a
painted-on burqa does nothing to illuminate the essay it accompanies. It's
trite and boring -- been there, done that.

Leila Ahmed is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity at
Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of A Quiet Revolution: the Veil's
Resurgence, from the Middle East to America, an adapted excerpt of which ran in
Foreign Policy.

Alifa Rifaat,
whose writing frames Mona Eltahawy's essay, was a wonderful and deeply subtle
writer -- one of Egypt's finest writers of the last century. Her stories are typically brief, powerful
meditations on themes of human desires and failures, and people's anguished loneliness
in the midst, supposedly, of intimacy -- between husband and wife, mother and
daughter, even mistress and maid. Publishing her work mainly in the 1970s and
1980s, Rifaat was probably the first Egyptian woman author to write fairly
directly about women's sexuality. She penned, among other things, a story in
which a woman whose husband figures only marginally in the story experiences
ecstatic sexual fulfillment with a jinn who comes to her in the form of a
woman.

Rifaat was
herself forbidden to write by her husband, a policeman, for a good many years.
She was thus intimately familiar with male chauvinism, as her stories, written
mostly from the perspective of a female character, make clear. But she was also
capable of writing very empathetically of men's travails, loneliness, and
failed hopes.

Disconcertingly,
Eltahawy strangely misreads (in my view) the Rifaat story with which she begins
her essay. After enduring "unmoved," as Eltahawy correctly says, her
husband's sexual exertions, the story's central character then eagerly rises to
wash herself and perform ritual prayers. Eltahawy reads these actions as
indicating Rifaat's "brilliant" portrayal of "sublimation
through religion."

Rifaat, when
I met her in Cairo in the early 1990s, wore the hijab, the Muslim head scarf.
And she explicitly spoke to me --in the course of a long, rambling conversation
in which she also talked of the tremendous importance to her of sexuality -- of
how much joy she found in prayer, and of how she (like the character in her
story) almost lived for those moments of prayer.

This ends the asked for contributions
that have been published in Foreign Ploicy magazine. What follows are four
selections by the editor.

Samia Errazzouki: Dear Mona Eltahawy, You Do Not Represent
“Us”

Samia Errazzouki is a Moroccan-American writer based in the
Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Her research focus is Morocco's political
economy and reforms. She blogs at http://samiacharquaouia.wordpress.com/

(Courtesy of
Almonitor)

When I first
came across Foreign Policy’s recent “Sex issue” cover,
I thought it was an attempt at blackface, but upon zooming in and reading the
title of the article by Mona Eltahawy,
my eyes were not fooling me. It really was a nude woman covered in a black
body-painted niqab.

They tell you
do not judge a book by its cover. But as an Arab-American Muslim woman, I could
not get that image out of my head long enough to even begin reading Eltahawy’s
article. I kept thinking about how the image degraded and insulted every woman
I know that wears or has ever worn the Niqab. This was the image Foreign Policy
chose to set up an article about the treatment of women in the Middle East and
North Africa.

The face veil
is rooted in pre-Islamic history, and Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam goes into a comprehensive explanation
of its roots in the region. Today, those who are fixated on the Niqab believe
that focusing on what a Muslim woman wears is what defines her thought, her
intellect, her capabilities, her sexuality, her gender and her very existence.
It is a narrative that’s been framed by the West and fed by the likes of Qasim
Amin and even Hoda Sha’rawi. Foreign Policy’s decision to choose this
photograph of a naked woman with a body-painted niqab embodies this problematic
narrative in more ways than one:

I realise Mona has likely been quite swamped with responses.
But her tweeting patterns suggest that she is responding mainly to two types of
people: those that are lauding her work, and those that have been shamelessly
slandering her. The problem is that there is a whole host of people in between
who want to engage with her intellectually and respectfully while explaining to
her precisely why they disagreed so deeply with her piece. After my own
numerous attempts to try and engage with her, it appeared pretty clear she
wasn’t particularly interested in this type of engagement.

So, here I am, irritated and disappointed, attempting to add
to the host of blog responses to Mona Eltahawy – unsure of whether or not she
will even bother to read the many sensible rebuttals, or whether she will
continue to push the idea that no one is providing coherent retorts. I have
made peace with this likelihood before I even sat down to write this.

Roqayah
Chamseddine: Us and Them:
On Helpless Women and Orientalist Imagery

Roqayah Chamseddine is
a US based Lebanese-American journalist, commentator and international human
rights activist; she was a member of the first Gaza Freedom March which took
place in December of 2009 in Cairo, Egypt.

(Courtesy
of The Frustrated Arab)

The web is
abuzz with talk of Mona Eltahawy’s latest entry, which made its way onto the
front cover of Foreign Policy, ‘Why
Do They Hate Us‘,
the “war on the women in the Middle East”; reactions vary from unwavering
support to venom-laced condemnation, and a multitude of other postures in
between.

In the
latest Foreign Policy feature, a part of their “sex edition”, Eltahawy laments
that “they hate us”, an unashamed amalgamation directed towards
men.

She
writes:

“Yet it’s
the men who can’t control themselves on the streets, where from Morocco to
Yemen, sexual harassment is endemic and it’s for the men’s sake that so many
women are encouraged to cover up.”“…women
are silenced by a deadly combination of men who hate them while also claiming
to have God firmly on their side.”

“I’ll
never forget hearing that if a baby boy urinated on you, you could go ahead and
pray in the same clothes, yet if a baby girl peed on you, you had to change.
What on Earth in the girl’s urine made you impure? I wondered.Hatred of women.”

Andas
per usual, Eltahawy ends with what has
become her catchphrase:“We are more than our
headscarves and our hymens.”

The
laundry list of crimes committed against women, including “virginity tests” and
genital mutilation, are serious charges which should not be ignored nor should
they be denied. Eltahawy, in her attempt to highlight indefensible crimes
against women, reaffirms the banal archetype of the poor, helpless woman of the
Middle East-North Africa.

Dr. Lamya Almas has a Ph.D. in English Literature from the
University of Minnesota, M.A. in English Language and Literature from Iowa
State University, B.A. in English Language and Literature with a minor in
Education from Aden University/ Faculty of Arts, Science and Education in her
home city Aden/Republic of Yemen. She is the recipient of Fulbright Scholarship
in 1997 and Myron Allen Fellowship from the University of Minnesota in 1999.

(Courtesy A
Yemenia’s Corner)

*For the record, although not a niqabi
myself I am tremendously proud of the amazing women of Yemen—all of them,
niqabis included. I am thus compelled to respond.

As the
international media is captivated by images of thousands of veiled women
protesters in the cities of Yemen, their ‘visibility’ and ‘participation’ is
increasingly obvious. Indeed, they were too visible that politically bankrupt
Saleh was compelled to resort to religious sensitivities by criticizing the
mingling of sexes at Change Square. In defiance media coverage intensified as
thousands of Yemeni women poured out of their homes, most clad in black Islamic
dress and full face veils declaring their roles in the protests as religiously
sound. They added their voices to raise the volume to a ‘roar’ demanding the
ouster of Saleh. Saleh’s fatwa was followed by the kidnapping of four female
physicians whose valor in the face of their kidnappers, and insistence on
continuing the quest to ouster the regime made headlines.

Meanwhile,
Egyptian-born writer and lecturer on Arab Muslim issues Mona Eltahawy and the
Muslim feminists she speaks for, claims they are “absolutely horrified by the
Niqab.” In an appearance onNewsnightto discuss the Niqab ban in France
Eltahawy says,

If you speak
to all the Muslim feminists I know, they will say that they are absolutely
horrified by the Niqab. The Niqab is not empowering. The Niqab is dehumanizing.
. . In 1923 in Egypt, the Egyptian feminist Huda Sha’rawi removed the face veil
and said this is a thing of the past. [Newsnight]

Who is Huda
Sha’rawi? And seriously, when 1923? Mona Eltahawy’s is referring to an event in
May of 1923, when Huda Sha’rawi and her protégée Saiza Nabarawi who were
delegates from the Egyptian Feminist Union [EFU] to the International Women’s
Alliance in Rome, removed their veils as they stepped off the train in Cairo.
It was a symbolic act of ‘emancipation’ that was influenced by Sha’rawi’s
readings of her friend and mentor, the Frenchwomen Eugenie Le Brun. Le Brun
conveyed to her the belief that “the veil stood in the way of their [i.e.
Egyptian women’s] advancement.”[1]

Henceforth, Sha’rawi acted as the liaison
between Western feminists and “Arab” feminists of the upper and upper-middle
class. She imported western feminist ideas valorizing the western, in this case
the European, as more advanced and “civilized” over the native who had to
abandon its religion, customs, and dress; and if unwilling then at least reform
its religion and habits according to the recommended imported guidelines. This
was justified by a genuine concern to civilize Arab societies, and save women
from a horrendous culture and religion they had been born into. Huda Sha’rawi’s
version of Arab feminism isolated indigenous women who believed they possessed
both the mental faculties and background that endowed them with a sense of
their right to autonomy, and the right to follow their own sense of what was
morally correct.

About Me

Gulamhusein A. Abba is an 88-year-old writer with more than 60 years in journalism. He is originally from Bombay (now Mumbai), where his writings have been published in almost all the important news media, in English, Urdu, Gujarati and Marathi, and where he functioned in various capacities, including reporter, news and political analyst, columnist, editor and publisher.
He was also a trade unionist,
peace and justice activist and took part in political activities.
As a trade unionist he organized the maritime petty officers and the film studio workers.
He founded and was the Chairman of the Rule of Law Committee and Taxi Users' Association
In the US, he is the chairman of Justice for Palestinians Committee, and, The Danbury Committee for World Peace.
In May of 2011, The Danbury Bar Association conferred on him the prestigious Honorary AMERICAN DREAM AWARD.